A giant art installation project that targets predator drone operators sitting thousands of miles away who refer to kills as BugSplats. Now they’ll see a child’s face instead.

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A giant art installation targets predator drone operators

In military slang, Predator drone operators often refer to kills as ‘bug splats’, since viewing the body through a grainy video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed.

To challenge this insensitivity as well as raise awareness of civilian casualties, an artist collective installed a massive portrait facing up in the heavily bombed Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa region of Pakistan, where drone attacks regularly occur. Now, when viewed by a drone camera, what an operator sees on his screen is not an anonymous dot on the landscape, but an innocent child victim’s face.

The installation is also designed to be captured by satellites in order to make it a permanent part of the landscape on online mapping sites.

The child featured in the poster is nameless, but according to FFR, lost both her parents and two young siblings in a drone attack.

The group of artists traveled inside KPK province and, with the assistance of highly enthusiastic locals, unrolled the poster amongst mud huts and farms. It is their hope that this will create empathy and introspection amongst drone operators, and will create dialogue amongst policy makers, eventually leading to decisions that will save innocent lives.

I love it, fight hatred with peace….this is whT they did with precious wars in training they called the Chinese “geeks” or other words,to,dehumanize the targets… The innocent are targets and victims of hateful brainwashed terrorists.